after all, the Homoean formula, ‘like the Father,’ was itself unscriptural. Scripture is adduced (§ 17) by Hilary to prove that the Son is not merely like, but equal to, the Father; and (§ 18) one in nature with Him, having (§ 19) the form and the glory of God. This ‘likeness’ is a trap (§ 20); chaff strewn on water, straw covering a pit, a hook hidden in the bait. The Catholic sense is the only true sense in which the word can be used, as is shewn more fully, by arguments to be found in the De Trinitate, in §§ 21, 22. And now he asks Constantius (§ 23) the plain question, what his creed is. He has made a hasty progress, by a steep descent, to the nethermost pit of blasphemy. He began with the Faith, which deserved the name, of Nicæa; he changed it at Antioch. But he was a clumsy builder; the structure he raised was always falling, and had to be constantly renewed; creed after creed had been framed, the safeguards and anathemas of which would have been needless had he remained steadfast to the Nicene. Hilary does not lament the creeds which Constantius had abandoned (§ 24); they might be harmless in themselves, but they represented no real belief. Yet why should he reject his own creeds? There was no such reason for his discontent with them as there had been, in his heresy, for his rejection of the Nicene. This ceaseless variety arose from want of faith; ‘one Faith, one Baptism,’ is the mark of truth. The result had been to stultify the bishops. They had been driven to condemn in succession the accurate homoousion and the harmless homoiousion, and even the word ousia, or substance. These were the pranks of a mere buffoon, amusing himself at the expense of the Church, and compelling the bishops, like dogs returning to their vomit, to accept what they had rejected. So many had been the contradictory creeds that every one was now, or had been in the past, a heretic confessed. And this result had only been attained (§ 26) by violence, as for instance in the cases of the Eastern and African bishops. The latter had committed to writing their sentence upon Ursacius and Valens; the Emperor had seized the document. It might go to the flames, as would Constantius himself, but the sentence was registered with God. Other men (§ 27) had waged war with the living, but Constantius extended his hostility to the dead; he con- tradicted the teaching of the saints, and his bishops rejected their predecessors, to whom they owed their orders, by denying their doctrine. The three hundred and eighteen at Nicæa were anathema to him, and his own father who had presided there. Yet though he might scorn the past, he could not control the future. The truth defined at Nicæa had been solemnly xxviii committed to writing and remained, however Constantius might condemn it. ‘Give ear,’ Hilary concludes, ‘to the holy meaning of the words, to the unalterable determination of the Church, to the faith which thy father avowed, to the sure hope in which man must put his trust, the universal conviction of the doom of heresy; and learn therefrom that thou art the foe of God’s religion, the enemy of the tombs of the saints69, the rebellious inheritor of thy father’s piety.’ 69 Hilary had previously (§ 27) asserted that ‘the Apostle has taught us to communicate with the tombs of the saints.’ This is an allusion to Rom. xii. 13, with the strange reading ‘tombs’ for ‘necessities’ (μνείαις for 41 The Life and Writings of St. Hilary of Poitiers.